Has The Blogosphere Failed Us?
For over forty years, three major news stations — ABC, CBS, and NBC — the Associated Press, and a few large newspapers were the primary means by which most Americans got their news and learned about political issues. During this period, there was little, if any, partisan-style debate by mainstream media journalists. That, of course, changed with rise of cable media in the 1980s and 90s resulting in the “Crossfirization” of political dialogue, as public discourse devolved into a clash of partisan extremes.
But if an elite group of media pundits and prognosticators had assumed control of the political debate in the 1990s, the rise of the Internet, and specifically the political blogosphere, after Bush-Gore in 2000 held out the promise of a new day where the American people, who presumably would be more moderate and reasonable than the cross-firing cable commentators, could make their voices heard again. Let freedom ring on the Web!, we said.
So has the promise of the net-roots been fulfilled? Let’s put it this way. If freedom is ringing, it sounds like a pack of barking hounds. Political blogs, thousands of which have emerged in the last decade, have come to be dominated by intense partisans and wing nuts.
A 2005 study by Lada Adamic and Natalie Grace, researchers at HP Labs and Intelliseek, concluded that the growing political blogosphere was extremely divided. After an extensive investigation including review of more than a thousand blogs, they found “very few” blogs calling themselves moderate or independent; virtually all were expressly either “liberal” or “conservative.” Moreover, Adamic and Grace found that the blogs primarily operated as echo chambers, rarely if ever linking to websites that did not toe their party’s line. Meanwhile, the Comments section of these blogs are typically confined to either a chorus of agreement or harsh, mean-spirited bomb throwing from “trolls” on the opposing side. But within a blog, opposition is rare.
This is what I call the paradox of participation. It’s a major conundrum for political scientists. Basically, the more involved a person gets in the process, the more intense their views become. And the more intense their views become, the more partisan and rigid they’re likely to be. It’s what George Washington called the “spirit of party.” Washington believed that this “spirit of party” was a destructive force and thus had to be vigilantly restrained by the people.
Washington could have never predicted something like the Internet. The rise of the activist Internet means that the partisan divide, while perhaps originating with the voices of the few, is exerting even greater effects on everyday Americans, and reaching many more people than just those tuning into Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Madow. Ultimately, it affects how we perceive reality. In fact, as Farhad Manjoo suggests in his book True Enough, it is “splitting” reality.
An example that Manjoo discusses is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), a group of Vietnam veterans who during the 2004 presidential campaign utilized the web to attack Democrat John Kerry’s (Sen-Ma.) military record in Vietnam, for which Kerry, in the heat of a primary campaign, had been taking a little more credit than usual. No member of SBVT was aboard Kerry’s boat during any of the incidents for which he was decorated. And the only member who had any eye-witness experience of any relevant event praised Kerry’s service.
The bottom line is that the Vets were Republicans who felt slighted by John Kerry’s criticism of the war upon returning home, which was well-documented and had been on the public record for years. In their gut, the Vets did not believe Kerry deserved to the leader of the free world. So they started publicly criticizing Kerry for his supposed “demoralization” of the troops over 30 years prior.
The more controversial element, however, was that the Vets also asserted that Kerry was lying about his conduct during the war — the same conduct for which high-ranking military officials awarded Kerry Purple Hearts and Silver Stars — to make himself look good. At best, this was a hunch. No credible facts supported it, and all credible facts controverted it. Weeks earlier Kerry had posted over 100 pages of his military records at his website, also making his military medical records available for inspection by reporter, with a summary from his doctor.
Since none of the complaining Vets witnessed any of the events in question, and since they otherwise could point to no facts other than Kerry’s well-publicized criticism of the war, the story seemed to have no legs. The Kerry campaign ignored it in the early stages. But after percolating up through the blogosphere, the media got hold of the story, causing a number of wealthy Republican to start throwing money at SBVT. The rest is history.
Manjoo refers to the event as the “splitting” of reality. Some thought it was ridiculous, others found it credible. But here’s the interesting thing: reality split largely on party lines. A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that 68 percent of Republicans found that the Vets’ claims were believable, while 73 percent of Democrats found them unbelievable.
Consumed by the “spirit of party” Republicans saw the ad as confirming a belief they already harbored about John Kerry — that he was unworthy. Equally consumed, Democrats considered it totally preposterous, an outright lie about their valiant candidate and not worth dignifying with a response.
Putting aside the question of which side had it right, reality had indeed split. And it was a distinctly partisan affair. Democrats saw one reality, one set of facts, while Republicans saw an alternative reality based on an opposite set of facts. It was not, Manjoo argues, a disagreement about what ought to be, the typical domain of political debate. It was a disagreement about what is, which is far more more severe. Most agree that this little reality-splitting show cost John Kerry the election.
A more recent example is a 2009 Pew Research Poll research poll showing that over twice as many Republicans believe President Barack Obama is a Muslim (which is false) as do Democrats. Again, the partisan correlation is strong. In a way it’s an even sharper example than the SBVT because one’s religious affiliation is such a brute fact. There can only be one truth there. Yet Americans are seeing two, one on each side of the aisle.
